Here is an interesting news item which claims that UK online ad spend overtakes mainstream TV. The same news was corroborated by another post which stated that spending on online advertising surpasses TV. The news was little disconcerting because it did not seem to match with my ground...

There are different opinions on these sites, but I focus on raw functionality not hype. By working daily to learn the nuances of how these social media tools work together, I have been contacted by professionals I would have never met through my own network.
All of these tools are i...

Okay, I've had about enough of this mindless, self-serving, me-me-me focused spamming. It was bad enough when it happened via email. Now it's happening with alarming frequency on LinkedIn, Twitter and Blogs. Can't people restrain themselves? Do they really think that pelting people wit...

I live 11 minutes away from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Friday evening I took a Cessna Caravan for a short 45-minute flight to Martha's Vineyard. This was my first trip to the island. I didn't do any research and had false expectations based on my long-time love affair with the is...

First, there are reasons to think that the raw exposure of sins and self-embarrassments at Facebook and other such sites won’t have a directly proportional effect on the quotient of nastiness. It will certainly provide a greater trove for those who are intent in wreaking havoc on peopl...

Strategy+Business is normally a very reliable and insightful publication but the recent article Reinventing Print Media was not up to their high standards. How could an article discussing - in depth - the future of print media leave out mobile tagging, MIR and AR? All three of these te...

Do you need it or not? Most socialites using twitter would quickly tell you that repeated messages from the same user is quite annoying. The average business person is thinking, How do i get one and which one is the best for my company. To fully understand the answer you would have to ...

We've talked about how easy it is to create digital dirt, but are you "listening" to make sure that your personal brand isn't tarnished? I'm going to talk about three free tools you can use to monitor your own name 1) Google Alerts - make sure to set up Google Alerts to email you when ...

Social and geopolitical changes, combined with economic and environmental factors, are rapidly altering, twisting and shaping the online landscape. And while it's daunting to keep track of how far we've come in the past few years, it's absolutely staggering to imagine what New Media wi...

Over the weekend I went through this process to check out a prospective partner, and ran into some good news and bad news. The good news is that this company has clearly embraced the idea of expanding its footprint by using a variety of offline and online marketing tactics and propert...

This afternoon I was sitting in a meeting discussing a potential upcoming marketing campaign to target developers. It’s a great concept, and I am looking forward to seeing it come to fruition. However, during the course of the discussion, it became clear that ad buys would be the pri...

There's a terrific colloquy between Google and Geoff Nunberg in response to Geoff's critique of Google's handling of the metadata attached to the books Google is digitizing (which I blogged about here). It's fascinating for its content, but also very cool as a conversation between a ...

Every time a new search engine pops up, bloggers, journalists and analysts get all worked up about its potential (or otherwise) to be a ‘Google Killer.’ I’ve written about this before, and really can’t understand the apparent obsession with ‘killing’ a company that’s continuing to do r...

Geoff Nunberg has a fantastic post warning about the poor quality of the metadata attached to the books Google is scanning into its soon to be dominant-to-the-point-of-monopoly digital library. Apparently, the attempt to gather metadata automatically from the scans has resulted in the ...

Because Chris had reviewed “Collapse of Distinction,” he and I have shared a dialogue. He’s interesting, smart, funny, and profound. In other words, an extraordinarily cool guy. I noticed that he was having a Tweet-up…an in-person “get-together” for people who follow one another on Twi...

I must confess I am very new to Ulitzer as an online channel of social communication media. But I am delighted about its raison d'être. However, I cannot help but ask these questions: Is Ulitzer the beginning of a new trend or the ultimate death of journalism? Or is it the glorificatio...

As I was doing my regular SEO optimization tasks here at Orchestra, I came across a site that literally made me laugh out loud. This site is a glowing example of what NOT to do when trying to attract traffic to a website.

An important milestone just got passed by Google – one of the big enterprise identity management vendors out there – Quest Software (full disclosure: I am working for the company) – has added Google Apps as a directory to which they can provision identities and access.
One might arg...

Twitter is a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected to their customers. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, par...

The announcement of Google’s new engine “Caffeine” could not have come at a better time. In light of the current Bug Battle competition, we have decided to add Caffeine to the lineup of search engines to test.
The competition is roughly halfway through (testing ends ...

About two months ago, I put together a post on the five ways professional services firms should use Twitter. From a readership standpoint, that post represents one of the all-time top five posts on Marketing Trenches. More importantly, we received a number of emails from professional...

Some may question if a given URL can be ugly, but to Google and other search engines, a URL can be as ugly as the shirt your grandmother gave you on Christmas. Successful Internet marketing and search engine optimization involves a large-scale project that includes a number of steps, t...

Microsoft recently released a new search engine called Bing. This search engine is supposed to go head to head with Google, although in my opinion, this Bing vs. Google war is not much of a war at all. While Bing and Yahoo may be able to fight the good fight against each other, Bing is...

In the spirit of fairness, I am determined to defend the marketers who make these types of statements. Here’s what Will left out - often times these misguided comments originate from an agency, consultant or service provider that the company has put its trust in. So let’s look for so...

With Yahoo shares down better than 15% in the two trading days since it climbed into bed with Microsoft, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the cat who ate the canary and maybe forgot there for a moment that he didn’t buy the company, told Microsoft’s annual analyst meeting Thursday that “It...

Last weekend Chris O'Brien (San Jose Mercury News) referred an "identity crisis" at Google, which immediately reminded us of a litany of technology companies which have ended up dabbling in too many markets for their own good. Breadth ultimately undermined synergy. It isn't hard to ...

Let’s be clear on this one: Microsoft isn’t partnering with Yahoo. It’s devouring it. It’s gobbling it up whole like a party snack before moving onto its next conquest. The argument, of course, is that not having to fund search will save Yahoo “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Well...

Our supplier of video services shall remain unnamed. When you arrive at the site you have to wait for flash video to load. Although it loads pretty quickly, the presence of flash is still an unnecessary barrier to getting the information you need to make a buying decision. The home p...

With its latest software update, open source groupware innovator Open-Xchange is previewing the ability to integrate social network information. For example, adding LinkedIn contacts into the Open-Xchange address book.

First of all, let me say that Cloud Sherpas is made up of several former Lotus Notes Professionals. In my previous role with a large Fortune 100 company, I was responsible for the implementation, support, and day-to-day management of a 30K Lotus Notes and Domino user base. I actually h...

So you’ve gone ahead and set up a blog for your company. Or maybe you are just starting to think about it but aren’t sure what to do – or whether you should even have a blog. No matter which of these camps you fall into, it’s critical to your success that you don’t just [...]...

Craig Newmark, best known for being the founder of the Craigslist website, is working hard to get the word out on Gov2.0. Last week in FedScoop, he really laid out how technology is improving our American democracy.
As stated in his article, Mr. Newmark hopes to help accelerate this...

So, ‘fess up. Who still doesn’t “get” Twitter?
This blog post derides Twitter, saying: “Did you lose your minds? Get a job. Are you that bored?” Well, I have a job, and that job’s in PR – a sector where Twitter is invaluable (hey, you can follow me if you like… I’m @PostcodeJim).
...